Re: Unicode/10646 History (was Re: [idn] An ignorantquestion about TC<-> SC)

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

Trying to refocus on things that actually relate to the IDN
effort...

--On Thursday, 01 November, 2001 13:44 -0800 Kenneth Whistler
<kenw@sybase.com> wrote:

> Han unification has nothing to do with the TC/SC problem. There
> are tradeoffs, but they aren't *this* tradeoff. Han
> unification neither created nor eliminated the TC/SC
> distinctions.

Well, we either disagree or we misunderstand each other.  I
certainly agree with your second observation about the creation/
elimination of the distinctions.  But, ignoring the several
other issues with TC<-> SC translation, the problem I keep
coming back to is the inability to map TC into SC, without
language-specific tagging, and without, as a side effect,
mapping Han-derived Japanese or Korean characters.  _That_
rather particular and narrow problem is a consequence of
unification in the sense that, were the three languages not
unified, this translation side effect would, I assume, not
exist. 

Again, this is not to suggest, and certainly not to debate, that
the tradeoff decision to do the unification was unreasonable.  I
also don't suggest that the decision was made lightly, or
without the support of relevant standards bodies in at least
some of the countries involved.  But, for this particular
instance of the TC<->SC matching problem, it does make things
harder.

The rest of the, largely historical, debate probably needs
strong drink (I'd have to go back to long-buried notes to
dispute some details of your chronology and under which
influences things happened, and we might (obviously) not
convince each other even then, but I would note that at least
one or two of the people you identify as key participants were
the same people who were saying "printer vendors" and "printing
priorities" to me in other roles), and we have, I think, wasted
enough of the WGs monthly quota of bits.  Much as I find it
personally amusing, I'd even recommend that you and Eric take
your sniping^H^H^H^H^H^H^H debate offline.

    john